


The CAM-era's Not Finished with His Last Vow

by SweetLateJuliet



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-15
Updated: 2014-01-15
Packaged: 2018-01-13 05:34:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1214593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SweetLateJuliet/pseuds/SweetLateJuliet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, Moriarty’s Dead But Not Gone (Hooray!)</p><p>Indications that we’re meant to understand the end of HLV as an emotional cliffhanger of unfinished business. Speculation that Moriarty is dead but we haven't seen the last of him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The CAM-era's Not Finished with His Last Vow

There’s a lot of John-related angst over HLV _(_ _How did he decide to stay with Mary? Why doesn’t he seem to care about Sherlock like he used to?_ _)_ and lots of plot-related skepticism _(_ _Why did Mary shoot Sherlock? How does he understand this as saving his life when he actually flatlined? Magnussen was *really* that influential without ever needing proof? What was his goal anyway, just “power”?_ _)_.

I get a general sense of disappointment or betrayal: How could they end it this way?

I think the answer might be: They didn’t. And they told us so.

The episode ends like this:

Sherlock says a restrained goodbye to John at the airstrip as he leaves his life forever. There’s poignant violin music. John and Mary watch the plane fly off. (They’re holding hands side-by-side and shown from behind just as they were at Sherlock’s grave in the beginning of TEH: they’re mourning together again.) Sherlock looks soberly out the plane window.

Tiny plane in a big sky. Violin dies away. Fade to black. We hear the distinctive percussion that starts the “titles” (credits) music. By the conventions of televisual storytelling, this episode is over.

Then the titles music is interrupted by audio static, and we see static on a television screen. (Psych! Episode’s not over!) Shortly, it resolves into a televised football match. We know we’re “watching TV” even though we don’t see a TV right away because of the picture quality and the titles superimposed on the image (score box and channel).

There’s another flicker of static and we see that the football match is on a television in a pub. Lestrade is at the bar watching. (There’s a tulip stained-glass window behind him; this is the same pub where he listened to Anderson’s crackpot theories during “Many Happy Returns.”)

We hear and see more TV static. Lestrade reacts to the flickery picture and the televised question, “Did you miss me?” from a technologically modulated voice. We keep hearing the question as we see the shocked reactions of Mrs Hudson and Molly.

Cut to Lady Smallwood asking, “How is this possible?” Mycroft gets the call (“But that’s not possible”) and Sherlock is recalled from exile. (Certainly hope he learned his lesson.:) On Mycroft’s car television, we see an animated picture of Moriarty asking “Did you miss me?” Cue the bouncy “Sherlock’s Theme,” which plays over the rest of the episode.

We see Moriarty on huge TVs in Piccadilly Circus and hear his question; all of England is seeing this. Mycroft tells Sherlock England needs him.

The image and sound abruptly cuts to Mary asking John how this could be. John doesn’t know, but he does know that Sherlock will be coming for Moriarty ( _if_ he’s back). Sherlock’s plane returns to the runway. As we hear the engines power down, the “Sherlock’s Theme” fades out, the titles music starts, and the credits roll.

And then there’s Moriarty again.

**Did You Miss Me?**

Unlike the football match or the other footage of Moriarty, this scene isn’t “on TV” in the story-world. It looks like the narrative world (where an “invisible” camera stands in for our eyes to show us what’s happening), but it occurs after the credits have rolled and we the viewers were released back to “real life.”

Moriarty looks directly into the camera - directly at us - and asks,  _Miss me?_

In one way, no. I didn’t miss Moriarty so much that I want him and Sherlock to have actually faked their suicides at each other. It’d be ridiculous.

When Sherlock “died” in TRF, most of us probably immediately thought “this can’t be real!” That’s an emotional response; we’re invested in Sherlock and John and don’t  _want_ Sherlock to be dead for their sakes or our own. It’s the way you’d reject the death of a real-life loved one. But it’s also a pragmatic response; a TV show called  _Sherlock_ couldn’t go on in the same way if Sherlock was really dead, and in ACD canon Holmes turns out not to have died in the Reichenbach Falls. And TRF quickly gives us narrative confirmation of this: Sherlock watches John speak to Sherlock’s gravestone, so we know Sherlock’s alive even though we don’t yet know how.

Moriarty’s different. We and Sherlock actually saw him blow his brains out on the Bart’s rooftop. (Or, as I think Moffat said, as close to that as you can show at half eight on BBC One.) There was no narrative ambiguity on that point, and in ACD canon Moriarty never “came back.” When John hears about Moriarty at the end of HLV, he doesn’t seem to entertain the possibility that Moriarty didn’t actually die. (“Absolutely. Blew his brains out.”) So if Moriarty  _isn’t_ actually dead in the story world of _Sherlock_ , that’d feel pretty in-credible to me. (Not to say it couldn’t go this way, of course. But I don’t think the explanation would be very satisfying.)

On the other hand, though: Seeing Andrew Scott as Moriarty chew the scenery? Watching Jim and Sherlock puzzle-flirt? Getting a fantastical minute of Morlock onscreen?

_Hell yes_ I missed you, baby. Bring on the flashbacks, the mind palaces, the recorded missives, the cracky fantasies. (Those last most of all, maybe.) If you can come back to this story without “coming back to life,” ooh, it’s Christmas!

**The Bow, and What’s Next**

But if Moriarty’s really dead, why bring him back at all? I’m less interested in the animated televised message and what will happen in the narrative (e.g., Moran or someone else using his persona for nefarious purposes) than in the interrupted titles music before the pub scene and Moriarty’s “miss me?” after the end credits rolled and the episode was “over.” That was no shawarma; it was a direct address to the audience, breaking the fourth wall.

_Moffat and Gatiss are playing with television conventions to undermine the idea that the episode is over._

The “clue” the showrunners gave for S3E3 was “bow.” This was of course a reference to ACD’s “His Last Bow,” and there are elements of that story here: bee-keeping in the Sussex Downs, a spy story, and an ominous east wind coming. “His Last Bow” is also narrated in the third person rather than by Dr Watson; maybe that’s why John’s inner life seems so opaque in HLV.

But the main villain of this episode was Magnussen, from ACD’s “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton,” and we didn’t get Sherlock’s last “bow” (his last case before retirement), we got his last “vow” (his commitment to John and Mary). So did the “bow” clue simply point to the story that inspired some of HLV’s thematic elements but not its plot, with a play on words for the title? (Maybe.)

We can understand Moriarty speaking directly to us as the showrunners taking an extra-diegetic bow for  _their_ performance (extra-diegetic = “outside the world of the narrative”). Ta-da, they say. You thought the story was over but we’re telling you there’s more. Maybe this shout-out to Jim is their reminder that a supervillain’s influence and terror don’t die when he does.

And wouldn’t that make it all better? If the next episode revisits the narrative time of this episode to fill in the holes, we’ll learn more about why John acted the way he did and how his actions fit with the deep care he showed Sherlock in TSoT. In flashbacks, we’ll see more Magnussen, who is a fantastically creepy villain to create and dispose of all in one episode, and we’ll learn more about what specifically he wanted from Mycroft.

The “east wind” in ACD’s “His Last Bow” was World War I. Magnussen’s desire for power over Mycroft, “the British government,” is never fully explained in HLV. Maybe they didn’t think they needed to. Alternatively, Magnussen had a much bigger plan than publishing newspapers and hoarding influence and we don’t yet know the extent. (To digress: Whatever else she is, Janine is a straight-up  BAMF  for keeping her eye open for one of those flicks. Yowza.)

When he visited 221B, Magnussen said, “I’ve interests all over the world but, er, everything starts in England. If it works here, I’ll try it in a real country. The United Kingdom, huh? Petri dish to the Western world.” This very specific trialling isn’t revisited in this episode, and I think we’ll hear more next time.

So: I think that CAM is dead but the Moftiss camera isn’t through with the events he’s set in motion, and the same is true of Moriarty. Although the allotted 90 minutes of telly time have elapsed, this episode isn’t over yet.

We know series 4 will happen. I hope and trust that a lot of the “plot holes” and “character flaws” that remain at the end of S3E3 are simply waiting for S4E1 to tell us more. (And what Captain-Watson-level BAMFness, then, to leave all those loose ends strewn about, inviting criticism, with only this subtle, coded promise that they’ll tie them up next time.)

For now, as we enter the hiatus, I’ll live in the questions. And you please show me the fic.


End file.
